By Mariama Fofana, American Red Cross Public Affairs
On the morning of January 31, Jackie Devine woke up like every other day, feeling amazing and energized. Thirty-seven weeks pregnant, Jackie was counting down the days until she could meet her second baby girl. However, not long into her morning routine, she started to feel a piercing pain in her right side.
“I knew that it wasn’t the baby. I could still feel her,” Jackie said.
Unsure of the origin of the pain, Jackie went to the hospital, where doctors noticed signs of preeclampsia and recommended keeping her overnight for observations. As her condition worsened, doctors decided to induce labor.
At 12:49 p.m. on February 1st, Jackie and her husband Michael welcomed their beautiful baby girl, Caylor, into the world. Caylor made her entrance quickly after the induction process began.
“It was a beautiful, miraculous birth,” Jackie said. “She came out perfect.”
However, soon after embracing her baby for the first time, Jackie started to feel the mood in the room shifting. One minute she was having fun with her husband, guessing the baby’s weight and the next, she was looking around in confusion, trying to understand what was happening.
“I could tell the speed in the room picked up quite a bit and the doctor was a bit concerned. I could start to feel pain,” she said. “They said they needed to call a code white, which is that there’s an emergency. I had no idea really what was going on.”
After her delivery, Jackie’s uterine muscles were not properly contracting down, causing her to hemorrhage uncontrollably. Her doctors could not get the bleeding to stop. Jackie was coming in and out of consciousness and lost her hearing for some time due to the amount of blood she was losing. At that moment, she received her first blood transfusion and needed to be rushed into surgery.
All Jackie can remember from that time is seeing Michael and Caylor being rushed towards her to say goodbye.
“It was traumatic and emotional,” she said. “I remember looking at him and said, ‘I’m going to be okay.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I know’ and I was like take care of our daughter. And they took me out.”
“I didn’t know I was going to be okay,” Jackie added. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen on the other side. I didn’t even know where I was going at that point. I just knew that I had to tell him that because he was about to be left completely alone with a new baby thinking that his wife was going to die.”
Not knowing whether she would ever get to hold her precious newborn, her husband or her beautiful toddler waiting at home to meet her new baby sister, Jackie was rushed into surgery.
“It was out of a movie,” she said. “Running down the hallway with the stretcher. Doctors and nurses were yelling at people to get out of the way and get the elevator.”
Jackie gave birth at 12:49 p.m., and by 1:15 p.m., she was in surgery with doctors fighting to save her life. Doctors eventually stopped the bleeding by using a non-invasive technique to cauterize the bleeding vessels in her uterus. Throughout the procedure, Jackie received a total of four lifesaving units of blood. Thanks to the medical team’s work and the blood she received, Jackie lives a happy life with her beautiful baby girls Collins and Caylor and her husband, Michael.
Extremely grateful to those whose blood saved her, Jackie cannot imagine what she’d want to tell them if she ever got a chance to meet them.
“That’s a powerful thing to think about,” she said. “I just think I would say thank you for saving my life, so I can be here with my two beautiful perfect baby girls. And that what they did truly did save somebody’s life.”
The need for blood is constant. Every two seconds, someone in the United States needs blood.
Each year, the American Red Cross collects more than 4.7 million blood donations and over 900,000 platelet donations from nearly 2.7 million volunteer donors. These donations are then processed into about 6.6 million blood products for transfusion to meet the needs of patients at approximately 2,500 hospitals and other facilities across the country.
While the American Red Cross of Colorado does not collect blood, the community is encouraged to support self-collecting hospitals by donating blood today. The Red Cross provides blood to 11 hospitals in Colorado, including Denver Health, Swedish and the University of Colorado Hospital.
A single blood donation can help save more than one life. Learn more on the Red Cross’s blood services page at https://www.redcrossblood.org/.